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The Friday Effect: How Communal Religious Practice Heightens Exclusionary Attitudes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2022

Steven Brooke Open the ORCID record for Steven Brooke [Opens in a new window] ,
Youssef Chouhoud Open the ORCID record for Youssef Chouhoud [Opens in a new window]  and
Michael Hoffman Open the ORCID record for Michael Hoffman [Opens in a new window]
Steven Brooke
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Youssef Chouhoud*
Affiliation:
Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia, USA
Michael Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Does attending communal religious services heighten the tendency to express exclusionary attitudes? Drawing on responses from thousands of Muslims, we identify how the ritual Friday Prayer systematically influences congregants' political and social attitudes. To isolate the independent role of this religious behavior, we exploit day-of-the-week variation in survey enumeration, which we assume to be plausibly uncorrelated with likely confounders, including self-reported religiosity. In our primary analysis, six variables charting various modes of intolerance each indicate that frequent attenders interviewed on Fridays (that is, proximate to the weekly communal prayer) were significantly more likely to express sectarian and antisecular attitudes than their counterparts. To test the potential mechanism behind this tendency, we rely on a controlled comparison between Egyptian and Algerian subgroups, as well as an original survey experiment in Lebanon. Evidence from both analyses is consistent with arguments that elite political messaging embedded in religious rituals spurs much of the observed variation.

Keywords

religious identitypolitical tolerancenatural experimentMiddle East
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 122 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Brooke et al. supplementary material

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